The client/server computing environment continues to expand into web services, often referred to as Web 2.0, with the latest iteration of Internet supported programmatic access to services and data provided by many providers. Traditionally web applications have been fairly static in nature. But as the various web browsers have both grown in capability and functionality and have become increasingly compliant with standards based computing, developers are moving to a viable application development environment that is highly adaptive, readily prototyped, and readily scaled through hosted web services. Much of the recent efforts are focused on optimizing these applications.
Hosting software within the web browser is beneficial for stabilizing cross platform compatibility, but is deficient in the area of performance benefits offered by traditional compiled language runtimes and specialized executable binaries. Efforts to increase responsiveness traditionally associated with rich client-based or so called “boxed” software solutions have focused on optimizing the rendering engine, the data model, or the script engine.
One such solution focuses on offloading security computations to a hardware component on the local device to enable hardware assisted SSL or similar secure protocols. This solution is designed to alleviate the computation burden from the systems processor. Other solutions utilize network topologies that support prioritization of packets for preferred protocols or endpoints. This solution allows some network services or applications to use a larger portion of the available network bandwidth at the expense of other network traffic. Still other solutions utilize network devices that support compression of payload, allowing more data to be transmitted via fewer packet requests.
A stronger solution is still needed as more applications are modeled to rely on services hosted within the internet.